Pyotr Posmakov, head of the penalty execution department...

Pyotr Posmakov, head of the penalty execution department of the Justice Ministry called for the abolition of the death penalty in Kazakhstan in a newspaper interview printed in the Kazakh weekly Karavan. "The death penalty is an unjustifiably cruel punishment, it doesn't justify the purposes for which it is ordered. What we ought to be thinking of is not who they are that have committed some of the most serious crimes and what kind of people they are but of who and what kind of people we are. Especially because a severe alternative can be offered, life imprisonment," Posmakov stated.